29 April 2013 5:50 PM

'Here Dead we lie' - the First World War revisited

I have spent much of the past few weeks living half in the present day and half in the terrible four years from 1914 to 1918. I spent many evenings watching (in most cases for the first time) the BBC’s majestic 1964 series ‘The Great War’, all 26 episodes of it. I missed it when it was first shown, though even then, aged 12, I had begun to grasp that 1914 was the most significant moment of modern history . As one reviewer of the series said at the time it was ’the most important historical event since the fall of the Roman Empire’.

In one way, you might say that it fulfilled all the worst aims of the French revolution (the triumph of the general will, the destruction of monarchy and aristocratic government, the binding of patriotism to political nationalism, the primacy of state over family and of egalitarianism over religion; the destruction of the Church and of Christian belief) ; It made the Russian revolution possible, elevated Hitler from insignificance to great power, and handed global dominance to the USA for 100 years. It also more or less created the disastrous idea of national self-determination for all peoples which – because it is practically impossible – became the pretext for all sorts of horrors far worse than the benevolent imperialism it so often replaced.

We did not have BBC2 at home (it wasn’t transmitted in much of the country outside London, and even where it was, sets capable of receiving 625-line transmissions were rare and costly) , and I was not allowed to watch TV at boarding school, so –even when it was eventually repeated on fuzzy old 405-line BBC1 I can’t have seen more than a dozen episodes. It always rankled with me that I missed it at the time. But to watch it as if it were new was a very odd experience . This was made more intense by my decision finally to re-read Robert Grave’s ‘Goodbye to All That’, which I hadn’t opened since about 1967, but which has burned large parts of itself permanently on my memory. I was amazed by how much I accurately remembered. (The series, by the way, is available as a boxed set, - got mine second hand - and some of you may have collected the individual DVDs when the Daily Mail was giving them away a few years ago).

It was disturbing because it was simultaneously very modern and very old. Its style and editing were very advanced for the time, and have to some extent been copied by every documentary historical TV series made ever since.

But it is also intimately connected with that is now the unattainable past. All of the interviewees, at the time in their early seventies, still spry and alert, are no longer with us. But then they were still in their full vigour. I was brushing past such people in buses and markets, mostly without realising how interesting they were, though I will say for myself that as a child I was given to questioning old people about the past, when I could. Some of them taught me in school. They had actually been on the great retreat on the Marne in 1914, or at the Somme. They had been among those crowds described by Philip Larkin in ‘MCMXIV’. It’s a sobering measure of how old I am that 50 years have passed since these forceful, articulate ghosts (astonishingly unidentified in almost all cases) gave their accounts. And when they were recorded, the events of which they spoke were 50 years in the past – almost exactly as far from me as the Great Train Robbery and the October 1964 general election – both of which I remember very clearly, are from me.

The programmes are very British in a way now impossible. Measures are in yards and miles ( except where it is necessary to refer to foreign kilometres, as in the kilometre posts on the road to Paris, showing how far the Anglo-French armies had retreated). The narration, by Sir Michael Redgrave, and written by distinguished historians, uses an educated and literate English of the sort that would now get you into trouble in a lot of places.

As so often with documentary film if you watch it all at once, episode after episode, you spot quite a lot of nifty repetition, and there’s far too much artillery, though you can see why. But there’s another thing – the faces. Of course, the mild, contented faces of the British young men , the New Army marching, singing to their deaths in 1916, are intolerably moving. The British people would never look, or feel or behave like this again. I am sure that we are less free because the best men went to their deaths and left no sons behind of the same quality. Those who would have stood up against the great siege of petty bullying that has enveloped us since 1914 are all dead and left no heirs.

But this is nothing compared to the film of the Imperial Russian army marching to war ( and to its grave) , so many magnificent, upright, healthy countrymen, totally unlike the stunted, downtrodden Soviet Man which was what was left after world war, civil war, famine, purge and second world war. To a greater or lesser extent this was true of all the main belligerents apart from the USA. But Russia’s woe was undoubtedly by far the worst, and I think this film, without even meaning to, shows it.

It is , I am glad to say, full of references to the Eastern Front so often forgotten in our discussions of this terrible event, though it is unforgiveably sketchy about the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, that neglected cataclysm which still shapes Europe’s destiny today. It describes the Dardanelles disaster, and the horrors of the Mesopotamia campaign, which I mentioned here the other day. The archive film even if sometimes repeated, is astonishing in its range and originality. There is no doubt, from this account, that a huge amount of the suffering and death really were the result of incompetence and folly.

I won’t enter here into controversies about its treatment of the war. My view remains that Germany deliberately started it, that Britain had no business entering it, that it is this – its pointlessness and worse than pointlessness from our point of view – that makes the dreadful sacrifice of so many young men so unforgiveable. After all, our great and costly efforts did not prevent German domination of Europe, which we now have anyway, on far, far worse terms than we could have had the same thing if France had been beaten in a swift war in 1914. I am not sure what France has gained, either, from pretending that it was militarily matched with Germany after 1870, when it wasn’t. Nor can I see what Belgium gained form holding up the German armies at liege for those crucial days at the start of the war (which was much more of a war of motion, at the beginning, than I had really understood).

As for the blockade of Germany, I quail at the thought of what we did. And as for inviting the USA into our quarrel, and imagining that she would not exact a stern price for her help, what were we thinking of? Lord Lansdowne, who increasingly seems to me to have been the most intelligent statesman of the age, gets a decent amount of prominence for his (entirely justified) doubts, though his great ignored letter urging a compromise peace before it was too late is not mentioned.

There is astonishing film of naval warfare including the German dreadnought Goeben, given to the Turks by the Kaiser (its German commander was given flag rank in the Turkish navy) and sent to bombard lovely Sevastopol , one of my favourite cities (this ship survived into the 1960s, and was nearly preserved, the last of the Dreadnoughts); the battle of Jutland, portrayed here as a more or less complete defeat of the Royal Navy by the Germans, in military terms; was it? Perhaps it was, though it was not enough to give the German Navy the freedom of the seas. There’s amazing film of a huge German submarine built to carry cargo through the blockade; and of the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian battleship ‘Szent Istvan’ (it means ‘Saint Stephen’) , the great and powerful monster, holed by an Italian torpedo, sinking at first slowly and then with a terrible, violent speed as its ship’s company try to save themselves. Happily, many did, But as always not all. To watch it now, when all involved are long dead, is nearly as distressing as it would have been at the time. It is never pleasant to watch the death of any ship, even an enemy. Defeat for this navy was total . Losing the war meant losing its coastline, and utterly ceasing to exist (though the Hungarian Admiral Horthy found other things to do).

And then there is the end, with Germany losing all, as must happen in the wars of democracy – and we know how that story finished. The final episode quotes an A.E.Housman verse which is so severe that it is not often mentioned. It comes after Charles de Gaulle is recalled as saying that France above all had lost all her young men, men she could ill afford to lose.

Housman wrote : ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose. But young men think it is, and we were young’.

(*NB my thanks to the reader who pointed out that I had got this quotation slightly but importantly wrong. I have corrected the mistake)

I have never, since I first heard these lines, been able to remain composed after reading them, even silently in my head.

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“We are taught, then, to expect, at the period referred to, some sudden and great derangement of the political atmosphere of Europe [“It is really as if in the atmosphere of the world there was some mischievous influence at work which troubles and excites every part of it.” So stated Sir Edward Grey in a debate in the House of Commons over the Second Moroccan Crisis, November 1911 (Hansard, vol. 32 cc47-165)], – [this derangement of the political atmosphere of Europe shall be] the consequence, most probably, of the action of the three spirits, who will succeed in charging it, as it were, with the most vicious, disorganizing, and antagonist elements which some event [the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand] will suddenly bring into fierce collision; and in a single day, as it were, the whole of Europe... will burst out in violent tumults and insurrections; that these will issue in a revolution of unprecedented magnitude – unprecedented both in the largeness of its sphere and the complete and radical character of its changes....

“The fall both of the little kingdoms and the great monarchies of Europe is plainly predicted in the Apocalyptic representation; for John saw in the earthquake every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. This revolution will be followed, or, more probably, accompanied, by a war of unexampled severity and horrors…. The prophecy of Daniel synchronizes with the seventh vial, and throws light upon it. The symbols of the two prophecies are different, but their import is most obviously the same. Both portend an entire change in the social and political fabric of Europe, – the fall of its kingdoms, the extinction of its dynasties, the alteration of its laws and forms of government... and the obliteration even of the territorial boundaries of its States. Nothing short of this can fulfil the figures of Daniel and the symbols of the Apocalypse.

“The earthquake [revolution] of the seventh vial is unequalled since men were upon the earth. Other revolutions strongly affected society: this will change the character of society.... In truth, the change has been going on for a century. It was began by the infidel writers of France, who sowed industriously the seeds which they knew would yield mighty revolutions to the world, after they should have gone to their graves. It next passed into opinion. And now it has completed its third and great stage, and stands before the world a fait accompli. History does not furnish an example of such another revolution, – a revolution which has advanced gradually, yet irresistibly, from its first principles, – which has moulded opinion for itself, – which has never advanced a stage till it had first prepared its ground, – which has required a century for its growth, and, now that it is fully developed, has changed the aspect of the world...”

(‘The Seventh Vial; Being an Exposition of the Apocalypse, and in Particular of the Pouring Out of the Seventh Vial’; Rev James Aitken Wylie, London; 1848).

I read this yesterday, and found the Housman quote rather touching. Today I learned that one of my girlfriend's cousins was just killed in Afghanistan: his jeep drove over an explosive buried in the road. Today I find the quote heartbreaking.

I may only be a young man, but I'm absolutely certain that life is immeasurably precious, and is a great deal to lose.

The best short piece on the various perspectives and arguments relating to the outbreak of The Great War, and British involvement thereto, is (in my opinion) contained in the first chapter of Hew Strachan’s ‘The First World War, Volume One: To Arms’ published in 2003.

Another work, of considerably greater length than that alluded to above, is John Charmley’s ‘Splendid Isolation?: Britain, the Balance of Power and the Origins of the First World War,’ published in 1999. The final third of this develops the theme of what the author terms a ‘Conservative,’ or 'Country Party', foreign policy tradition in relation to the outbreak of war in 1914. His conclusion, insofar as it is possible to summarise it in a very few words, is that British involvement was a departure from that tradition. To quote from one of his reviewers: ‘The decision for war in 1914 was, then, the most fatal one in a series of political blunders from the late 1870s to 1939.’

This of course is very much in agreement with what you have written, both now and previously.

I happen to disagree with both of you, finding both 1914 and 1939 to be entirely consistent with many centuries of British foreign policy that disavowed continental hegemony by any one power, and often fought to maintain that ‘balance of power.’

But there we go; that is the nature of historical debate and hopefully we all learn something from engaging in it, and long may it continue.

I am though particularly intrigued by your suggestion that the outcome of The Great War ‘fulfilled all the worst aims of the French revolution,’ and your list of these (presumably) evils.

Is not ‘the triumph of the general will’ a euphemism for democracy?

I ask only because your next point about ‘monarchy and aristocratic government’ seems to suggest that the latter was a preferable system, and I know you have railed against universal suffrage previously.

These themes, and the others you mention, are (in my opinion) worthy of much greater exploration and analysis, and I do hope that you will find time for them to be explored.

Finally, Housman is a wonderful poet and writer and his work often evokes a huge degree of nostalgia. Indeed, referring particularly to ‘A Shropshire Lad,’ it did so with relation to a vanishing, if not already vanished, rural past shortly after publication in the 1890s. From this distance in time that work in particular is evocative of the golden age that was brought to a close by war in 1914.

That there was indeed a belle époque is a comforting thought.

It is also greatly misleading.

Indeed, if there is any truth in Thoreau’s maxim about the ‘mass of men’ leading ‘lives of quiet desperation’ then, I would argue, that was probably more so the case during the ‘long nineteenth century’ than afterwards, and most certainly more so than now.

I think Peter has touched on a very important and little thought of point about our history when he talks about how, had they lived, the 1914 generation would have confronted much of the soft-bolshevist bullying we currently suffer under. The Great War cost us the flower of our race; the culmination of a people forged and refined in honest labour, battle, prayer, industry and commerce from the before Norman Conquest till those evil days. We are without doubt a people diminished in quality and stature, living in the ruins of a civilisation our forefathers built whom we only now half-remember through the fog of a century of propaganda and social engineering.

Yes, you stated that before, more than once and you said the same about 1939, it's easy to say that now but the men running Britain and Ireland were vain-glorious and were looking for an excuse to being a big part of the action, Germany's invasion of Belgium provided it. Had the United Kingdom's politicians, Admirals and Generals stayed aloof, they foresaw that when it was all over - our islands would look fairly insignificant to the rest of the world.

Several contributors to this thread seem to imply that modern PC multicultural Britain is the antithesis of old Imperial Britain. I would argue that the opposite is true: that the rampant trashy consumerism and cultural leftism of modern Britain is the logical endpoint of the values of the Empire. British imperialism was not a conservative force either at home or abroad; on the contrary the Whiggish materialistic ideology that drove it systematically destroyed tradition everywhere - including in Britain itself.

"I have never, since I first heard these lines, been able to remain composed after reading them, even silently in my head."

One wonders how anyone could read such scripted artistry (my goodness, Housman achieves enormous content, with such economy of words) and remain unmoved, but sadly a lot do so. Wonderful stuff once again, its always a wee highlight to get these little pieces that fall outside the usual contentious issue stuff, so please keep em coming.
It reminded me of your recital of Housman's "The Land of Lost Content" on QT last year, emphatically separating your wheat; from the rest of the panel's chaff.
I was completely unaware of Housman's work (I'm ashamed to say, though I can't entirely blame my secondary modern schooling for that, maybe I just wasn't paying attention) but thanks to this blog I am slowly catching up, and enjoying getting acquainted.
I don't know if you caught it, but there was a wonderful program on BBC4 only last night (Monday) called: "The First World War From Above", where one of these articulate ghosts you speak of, actually came alive for his elderly daughter who is still alive and well, and living in France. The presenter showed her an old film reel, of which, she was, previously, completely unaware, of her father flying an airship over the trenches just after the ceasefire. She had never seen her father in anything other than still photographs, and her reaction was extremely moving. What a wonderful gift the presenter (Fergal Keane) brought to this lovely lady who lost both her parents to Nazi tyranny during WW2.

There was another part of the program that told of the first moments of the Somme immediately after the artillery barrage ceased, and how the second and third waves of soldiers, witnessed the complete slaughter of the wave that went before them, and yet, they still advanced toward those machine guns and inevitable death. Why didn't somebody stand up and say: enough is enough!
One wonders about your notion that they (if they hadn't died) "would have stood up against the great siege of petty bullying that has enveloped us since 1914 are all dead and left no heirs." As much as I would like to agree with you, surely the time to stand up against the bullying, was right there and then, against the idiotic and heartless high command donkeys of that tragic war.
Yes indeed those events had an historical magnitude to equal (perhaps surpass) any other event in human history, far greater than most, and beyond comprehension I feel.

I'm afraid this is not about the first world war, although your assertion that it damaged Britain's standing as a world power is one I would agree with . You recently visited the University of York, and I spoke to you afterwards. However I forgot to thank you for, in previous articles for this paper, recognizing the atrocity which occurred in Eastern Europe after the that region was occupied by the Soviets following the end of the European war phase of the second world war. In your article of the 28th of November last year, you refer to the terrible fate of those ethnic Germans and Hungarians who had the misfortune to be outside the borders of the New Germany. There the horrors of Nazism were repeated, even down to a insidiously ironic use of the same camps. I dislike identity politics, and would self-identify as a Briton. But as someone with Silesian antecedents (Whom had moved to Bavaria before the war, thank God) I thank you for raising this issue in a major national newspaper.
While I disagree with some of your conclusions about the World Wars (I think that the Allied superiority in tanks could have prevented the fall of France, if they had been intelligently used), it is to your credit that you condemn these crimes for what they were,
monstrous.

Peter Hitchens writes:-
"The British people would never look, or feel or behave like this again. I am sure that we are less free because the best men went to their deaths and left no sons behind of the same quality. Those who would have stood up against the great siege of petty bullying that has enveloped us since 1914 are all dead and left no heirs."

What the 21st century British people are so tragically blind to is the extent to which their nation, communities and their individual lives are so suffocated by such small minded intolerance dressed up as something that claims to be precisely the opposite. As Isaiah Chapter three suggests to us - when the power of Satan is at its height, your leaders shall have the minds of children and women shall control them.

We now live lives overshadowed by those who know this truth deep down but hate it. As they hate all fundamental truths about reality. I refer, of course, to the modern Left.

But as G. K. Chesterton once remarked ;-
"The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all."

Mr. Hitchens - my apologies if you'd not appreciate the interjection, but if you're re-visiting 'Goodbye to all that', I'd recommend you also take in (or take in a further time if you have previously read) Sackville-West's history of Joan of Arc. Bearing both books in a near-parallel time frame reveals a remarkable semblance of the landscape both Joan (or Jean...) and Graves once walked in separate eras. The comparison can be quite eeiriely prescient.

Incidentally (sorry) also recommended, if you've not crossed it before, is Graves' poem 'The Foreboding' - one of my favourites.

Mr Hitchens writes;
“… we are less free because the best men went to their deaths and left no sons …”

I treasure my memories from the days in East Hampshire in the middle of 1980s.
I lived in an old Manor house in a village several months both studying and working.

What I regret now is that I did not know anything about a poet Edward Thomas at that time. Later I read his poems and learned about his life, his encounter with American poet Robert Frost and his daily long walk in the forest of Steep near Peter’s field. It is not far from the village I lived.

When I read Mr Hitchens post above I thought about the poet and his poems - especially Rain (1916). In a way, I experienced the Great War through this poem.

Edward Thomas was not a young soldier but he was young as a poet. He had a wife and children and newly found gift of writing poetry when he voluntarily joined the army. He was killed in battle at Arras in 1917.

Although I am a foreigner I may be allowed to add that the country is “less beautiful and thoughtful because the best men of letters went to their deaths”…

Even the very term Great War fills me with sadness. I remember as a child in the mid nineteen fifties coming across a war memorial dedicated to the 'glorious dead of the Great War'. At that time popular culture was still very full of WW2 references and the notion of WW3 had already entered the language, I was confused. My mother explained that it was now also known as the First World War, but they had called it the Great War at the time because they had no idea that there would be a need to start numbering them. The war to end all wars, or so they thought. Twenty one years later we learned the the bitter truth of the maxim, "It takes a year or two for a country to to re-arm, but it takes a whole generation to replace its army."

May I suggest that given the overwhelmingly Christian ethos of both sides, neither was willing to forgive the other without evidence of repentance from the opposition and so early peace negotiations were impossible.

Wonderful post. And that Housman extract is difficult to read without a lump in the throat.

Mr Hitchens, have you read "Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of The British Officer in the First World War"? by Victor Lewis-Stempel. It's a very moving book, not least because it shies away from fashionable moralising about the pre-1914 world and focuses on the undoubted virtues and strengths of that lost England; Christian belief, patriotism, self-sacrifice, bravery, pluck, and loyalty to school, college and regiment.

I watched The Great War in 1964 when I was in my 20s. It profoundly affected me. When the opportunity came up to obtain the DVD's, I readily took it. Then, viewing the series through more mature eyes, I became even more affected. The sights of men and beasts being slaughtered for no good reason are always with me. Like you, Peter, I do not believe we should have entered into the conflict, although our leaders and their Generals were innocent of the horrors to come; nor should we have become embroiled in WW2 when everyone was far more knowledgeable. Our place on this planet is not on the Continent. The series should be viewed by all students of history although one wonders if the teenagers of today would be able to stomach it.

“… about the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, that neglected cataclysm which still shapes Europe’s destiny today.”

I confess to not having heard of this treaty. A first, possibly unreliable, point of reference for things I know nothing about is Wikipedia.

“The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk lasted only eight and a half months. Germany renounced the treaty and broke diplomatic relations with RSFSR on 5 November 1918. The Ottoman Empire broke the treaty after just two months by invading the newly created Democratic Republic of Armenia in May 1918. In the 11 November 1918 Armistice with Germany that ended World War I, one of the first conditions was the complete abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.”

As far as I can tell (from Wikipedia), the treaty embodied a surrender of RSFSR ambitions in Finland, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics. An exhibition of my ignorance in this, but why was this then a cataclysm which still shapes Europe today?

Peter said: 'I am sure that we are less free because the best men went to their deaths and left no sons behind of the same quality.'

I had the same unhappy thought recently while reading my late father's Second World War diaries. Academically gifted, Dad cheerfully gave up career hopes to volunteer for the war, at the age of 18. He came home safely - or I wouldn't be around. But the diaries speak of the muddy slit-trenches and high casualty rate that characterised the Gothic Line fighting in Italy in autumn 1944.

It struck me that the most patriotic, idealistic, unselfish and courageous men probably did die in exceptionable numbers, since they would have voluntered early and taken risks. So we were doubly deprived - both of their sons and of the post war politicians other leaders we should have had. Perhaps we never recovered.

That said, Dad seemed always of the opinion that Britain's entry into both wars was justified and inevitable. 'The Kaiser's German was Hitler's German writ small,' he once said. And he seems to have found excitement in fighting.

Just in case anyone is interested, I've recently posted up an illustrated and typed selection of his diary entries. Google "jim's War' and 'Diary of a D-D-Dodger' and it might come up.

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